Dick Stivers - Scorched Earth

Flor had died there.

Less than a year before, during a helicopter pursuit of a truck loaded with a Soviet-made synthetic drug intended to create panic and flame a racial war in American society, the woman Lyons loved died.

While he watched from another helicopter, her chopper took a direct hit from a rocket-propelled grenade. After the eighty-mile-per-hour crash and the explosion of the helicopter's aviation fuel, the coroner's aides had not even found enough of Flor to bury.

The horror and the sorrow of her death had wounded him in a way he still did not completely understand.

Some nights, he would wake and find himself bathed in sweat, his pulse beating in his ears, his throat hoarse and knotted. His neighbors in the condominium complex where he lived complained to the condo management of noises coming from his unit. He received citations for loud parties, for loud television, for loud stereo — he never argued, he paid the twenty-five-dollar fines immediately. He didn't attempt to deny or explain the noises.

Some nights when he woke, his body drenched with sweat, images remained in the darkness: a desert flowing with blood, bones in the sand, blood flaming, his hands reaching into flames to touch her and coming away bloody.

He did not understand the injury to his soul. But there was one thing he did know: Flor died to stop a shipment of Soviet-synthesized terror drugs, and the truck carrying the shipment of chemical horror had left Culiacan the day before.

The truck left Culiacan a day after a Soviet freighter docked in the port of Mazatlan, a city that was three hours south of Culiacan by truck.

The White Warriors had begun their takeover of the Culiacan drug industry a year before. The beginning of the takeover coincided with Flor's death.

He had read the official reports. He had the documents and the black-and-white photographs taken by surveillance teams. He knew the secondhand stories told by informers and interrogated suspects — like the stories told by Miguel Coral. He knew the rumors and he knew how psychopathic killers operated.

Questions screamed through his mind as he attempted to rationally analyze impossible contradictions.

Why did white gunmen work for Black Nationalist terrorists?

Did the White Warriors somehow play a role in the death of Flor?

Did the black racist gang bringing Soviet-synthesized terror drugs into the United States use a gang of Fascist International drug smugglers as couriers?

Did the strange politics of the Soviets and the Fascist International interweave?

Did an alliance of Stalinists and Nazis prepare a terror assault against their common enemy, the United States, the world's strongest democracy?

Tons of heroin, billions of dollars, the gang wars of Culiacan — those things diminished to nothing when he thought of Flor destroyed in that desert outside San Diego.

The image of his woman falling flaming from the sky was burned into his mind forever.

Lyons went south with only one thought: revenge.

A half hour into the flight, their briefing was interrupted when a voice came over the intercom.

"Businessmen, this is your pilot. The Culiacan office requests an overflight of the mountains east of Ciudad Obregon. Mexican officials report a significant antidrug operation in progress in the Sierra Madres on the border of Sonora and Chihuahua. The office requests that I overfly the area and report — just a second..."

The door to the pilot's den slid open, and Davis leaned into the passenger cabin.

"What the office wants is a confirmation of the action. They want us to count the trucks, count helicopters, get the actual coordinates. You mind if we take the detour?"

"Is this sightseeing or what?" Lyons demanded.

"It's official sightseeing. The office ordered me to sightsee, even if it delays your arrival time."

"There will be no problem with fuel?" Blancanales asked.

Davis shook his head. "No problem. It's only a few flying minutes out of the way. And it will give you a chance to see the Condors — that's the Mexican army antidrug task force — in action. If they are in fact in action."

"If?" Blancanales refolded the navigation chart to look at the Sonora-Chihuahuan sector east of the coastal city. "Is there some doubt..."

"Man," Davis said with a laugh. "Don't you know what goes on with the Mexicans? The U.S. of A. pays for the truck and helicopter fuel, and sometimes underwrites the salaries of the federales and the expenses of the army. So the Mexicans tell us about such-and-such operation and present the bill for the expenses. But sometimes, they're..."

Gadgets smirked. "Invisible!" he said.

Davis nodded agreement. "It has happened. The new administration in Mexico City is different from the last one. They threw out most of the criminals and changed the laws, but laws don't mean anything when there's money to be made. La Mordida is forever. Everyone wants their bite of the action."

"You mean the people the DEA works with are corrupt?" Lyons asked the pilot.

"If they're Mexican," the pilot told him.

Lyons turned and commented to his partners, "We don't want any liaison, right?"

Blancanales looked to Miguel Coral. "We brought our liaison."

Their pilot laughed. "You can't even worry about it. Down south here, you buy your friends. It's a tradition."

"No!" Coral shouted at the pilot. "It is a crime. You know nothing of my country or its traditions."

"I know corruption is a Mexican tradition that will never change."

"North American, you misunderstand..."

"You misunderstand..."

The words summarized the history of the United States Drug Enforcement Agency alliance with the Mexican federal authorities in the war against heroin. From the first years, when the DEA established and guided the war, the North Americans ignored the beliefs and traditions of Mexico.

Mexicans believed only the lowest, most vile subclass of criminals dealt in drugs. Therefore Mexican investigators and prosecutors did not believe North Americans with their wealth and opportunities would waste their lives in the drug subculture. They considered the heroin trade and American addicts beneath their concern.

Nationalism also played a part. When the DEA traced heroin seized in the tenements of Los Angeles and Detroit and San Antonio to the western states of Mexico, the drug-enforcement officers expected the same cooperation they demanded and received from state officials in the United States. The officers reasoned that heroin represented a threat to both the U.S. and Mexico.

The demands of the DEA officers offended the national pride of the Mexicans. The Americans did not speak Spanish. The Americans presented documents in English and expected immediate comprehension. When Mexican prosecutors and field agents with no experience whatsoever with drug syndicates required detailed briefings, in Spanish, to understand the complex networks of heroin transport and distribution operating in the United States, the DEA presented only cursory and incomplete overviews.

Finally, Mexico had a fundamentally different justice system. In the United States, courts presume innocence until the proof of guilt. In Mexico the police prove guilt to a prosecutor who then orders the arrest. To win release, the Mexican suspect must then prove innocence. DEA officers went to Mexican prosecutors with stacks of files on suspects who had fled to Mexico. When the Mexican prosecutors expressed disbelief at the American system of justice that arrested criminals, released them, allowed the criminals to flee the country, then expected other countries to arrest them, the Americans called the Mexicans corrupt, in the pay of the gangs.

In most cases the accusations proved to be untrue. But the charges and countercharges disrupted the cooperation between the two governments. The atmosphere of distrust and misunderstanding provided camouflage for the truly corrupt. Those public officials and police on the secret payrolls of the syndicates explained the failed investigations and continuing drug trade on the " gringos brutos ."